Maybe send an articulate and polite email to James Clark querying the current position and making a coherent alternative proposal. You've spent way more time already on here criticising the club to those who don't manage ticketing arrangements than this would take so could potentially be a quick win for all concerned.

If he needs me to send him an email in order to know it's a problem then there's no point sending an email anyway, however the club are well aware of the issue but wont pay more to the smc than they have to as were paying through the nose for what we get.

Interestingly I was reading about Coventry city who wont be playing in Coventry next year as they have fallen out with the rugby team who now own the stadium. It said they had only been paying £100k a year rent plus contributing something towards the costs of upkeep but significantly less than the £600k we pay and they play almost twice as many games

It should all be sorted after Brexit

From your chat with ccs I'm not sure we have 100% clarity on what restrictions there are and whether the club have done a cost benefit analysis. Just suggesting this as a route to bottoming the issue out.

You could always send them a pie chart but to be honest if the people running a £3m+ turnover business cant work it out for themselves then they're never going to listen to someone else telling them about it. We all know it's down to strict cost control and they're pretty confident the fanbase will put up with it so don't do anything. My view is it's short termism. The easier you make it for your customers to deal with you the more they will. I can pretty much guarantee that if people could still walk up and pay cash at the turnstiles then our crowds would be higher. If it were easier to buy tickets more would be sold

I just don't see why you wouldn't spend 5 minutes composing a concise email to James Clark just to confirm. You're making a lot of assumptions about the SMC framework, budget capacity and sales elasticity but you don't have the data the club has on either. You don't know for sure what response you would get and there's a chance you'd be enlightened for less effort than continued supposition on this thread. Just a thought.

I've sent stuff through in the past and all you get is generic waffle back so won't waste my time but thanks for the suggestion. If james clarke can't work out that it's unacceptable to have people stood outside in all weathers for 3 hours queuing up for tickets for a rugby semi final, when supporters of the other 3 semi finalists can order from the comfort of their armchairs then he shouldn't be in the position he's in.

Now I know you see yourself as the unofficial guardian of the club's reputation but you know I'm right and I know you won't admit it on here. Do you still get a free pass?

I think some people, perhaps a minority, enjoy the queuing as part of the big event occasion. Some want to buy large numbers of tickets to sit together which may be tricky to administer on an online system where you need to register passes to customer accounts and so on. The "acceptability" of it depends on the context of the arrangements the club is working within. I don't know what they are, but they might be different to those of the other clubs involved.

As usual we get some nonsense about me in response to some reasonanle questions. I am a supporter of the club, you are right. I won a free pass a few years ago when Feka was playing, but it was a one off as part of a, promotional competition that year. Trying to use this as some sort of perverse leverage in a reasonable debate makes you look silly.

There's quite a lot of mis information on here regarding selling tickets online and who's to blame, the situation is as follows;

The SMC have the ability to sell tickets for any game online, they do however charge a significant admin fee per ticket, the club were not willing to pay this.

The club tried to get the RFL to sell their tickets online for free, the RFL rightly refused as this would be unfair on other clubs, they did offer to sell our allocation online charging us per ticket to cover their own costs, we refused.

So we are left with telephone sales and in person and like it or not its entirely the clubs own doing.

We're a blessing and a curse for the RFL at neutral events, we are guaranteed to sell tickets but we are one of the worst run clubs in that regard.

That's helpful context thank you. For the final obviously you can buy from the RFL online in the Hull end - we did this in 2017. So perhaps it comes down to putting something in place on the offchance we get to the CC semi final as the only other neutral venue fixture of the year.